Virago organised a major public rally around the book upon its publication, making it part of the movement it describes rather than a retrospective account produced safely afterward. 

Published at the height of the renewed nuclear-arms race, Over Our Dead Bodies gathers essays, testimony, poems and political argument by women opposing nuclear weapons and the machinery built to make their use imaginable. 

The collection grew from the British women’s peace movement surrounding Greenham Common, but its field is wider than a record of one protest camp. Contributors including Bel Mooney, Jeanette Burski, Gay Clifford, Beryl Rule and Dorothy Thompson examine deterrence, civil defence, the physical effects of nuclear attack and the political language used to domesticate mass death. Its contributors approach the bomb not merely as a question of military strategy but as a social system: one sustained by secrecy, obedience, masculine authority and the bureaucratic talent for discussing annihilation as though it were infrastructure policy.

Thompson’s own essays dismantle the fantasy that those accumulating weapons are also capable of protecting the populations placed beneath them. The title is not rhetorical flourish so much as a literal correction to official reasoning. It captures anti-nuclear politics before it could be tidied into heritage: impatient, internally varied and intent on connecting militarism with the organisation of ordinary life. 

Virago Press first edition, 1983. Paperback with light rubbing, handling marks and mild edgewear; clean, firm copy.